Religious but not right

Have evangelicals abandoned the Religious Right for a more moderate center? Some say yes.

The evangelical vote historically has been a finicky one, propelling “born-again” Christian Jimmy Carter into the White House in 1976, yet helping to unseat him in 1980 for the perceived more socially conservative Ronald Reagan.

Seventy-eight percent of evangelicals voted for President Bush in 2004, helping to secure a narrow re-election, at least partly in reaction to controversy over the attempted legalization of gay marriage. But in the 2006 mid-term elections, nearly 30 percent of white evangelicals, the true Republican base, voted Democratic.

Democratic strategists are murmuring to one another over the shrinking “God Gap,” while Republicans cry “not so fast,” pointing to the fact that evangelical support of Mr. Bush was unusually high in 2004, even for a Republican candidate.

Standard-bearers of the Religious Right were unable to come to a consensus on a Republican presidential candidate during the primaries. Leading Democratic candidates hired religious advisers. And the younger generation of church leaders have deserted traditional social issues such as abortion and gay marriage to focus on social justice issues such as poverty, fighting AIDS in Africa and torture.

Younger evangelicals, in particular, are becoming more aware and increasingly concerned about issues traditionally assigned to the left. Emerging church leaders — some powerful enough to be included on Time magazine’s list of the 25 most influential evangelicals — have spoke on these very issues.

One from that list, former D.C.-area pastor and author Brian D. McLaren, recently authored “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope,” a book that reads partly like a U.N. report, partly like a theological exposition and partly like an activist’s creed.

Mr. McLaren says global poverty, destruction of the environment and increasing violence in the world must be addressed and calls for the church to “change its framing story” and to start trying to change public opinion in these areas. He launched a tour called “Everything Must Change” and is currently traveling throughout the country rallying support.

Some think these changes are in part generational. Those who guided the political discourse of the Religious Right are passing, such as Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. James Dobson and Pat Robertson are in their 70s, while their replacements are much more diverse in their politics, falling anywhere on the spectrum from conservative to moderate to liberal, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

“Issues important to the evangelicals in ’08 won’t be unlike the issues for most people — the economy and the war on terror,” says Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

The prospect of replacing a handful of Supreme Court justices during an eight-year presidency drove many evangelical voters to the polls in 2000, while the Bush campaign capitalized on tensions over gay marriage to inspire the Religious Right on Election Day in 2004. Mr. Cromartie thinks traditional social and cultural issues such as abortion will remain close to the hearts of evangelical voters in November, as will the prospect of even more openings on the bench.

Data show that younger evangelicals in fact are as pro-life as their parents and grandparents, some even more so, Mr. Green said.

“We’re not seeing the younger drifting away from social issues; they’re adding new issues. Some evangelicals are being criticized for not preaching the whole Gospel, only focusing on traditional moral issues. [The younger generation] is interested in applying their faith to a broader range of issues — poverty, human rights, etcetera.”

Meanwhile, politicians on both sides of the political divide have begun tothink differently about how they approach the subject of religion.

All of the remaining presidential candidates have spiritual advisers and have made extensive efforts to appeal to religious voters, whereas Sen. John Kerry’s religious outreach coordinator in 2004, Mara Vanderslice, was frequently ridiculed or ignored. And some say the Democrats are just getting better at it.

“Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will have a more significant understanding of religious communities and religious outreach efforts than John McCain,” said Amy Sullivan, nation editor at Time magazine and author of “The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap.” “Four years ago if you had predicted that about Democrats and Republicans, no one would have believed you.”

McCain religious staffers in Iowa quit last spring because they felt they weren’t being taken seriously, Ms. Sullivan said. Such a grievance used to be far more likely to come from Democratic religious staffers “if they even existed,” she added.

Ms. Sullivan also calls the Arizona senator’s acceptance of megachurch pastor John Hagee’s endorsement in Texas a “misstep,” saying the campaign should have anticipated that Catholics would “not be too psyched about a guy who called them the whore of Babylon.”

“It betrayed an unfamiliarity with the religious world that is typically not something Republicans suffer from,” Ms. Sullivan said.

And that same weekend, former President Bill Clinton was in Texas visiting another megachurch — that of New York Times best-selling author Joel Osteen. In a debate in South Carolina, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois discussed how he thought the Democrats had made a mistake by not reaching out to evangelical voters.

Promptly after the defeat of Mr. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, in the 2004 presidential election, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chastised the party for forgetting the religious community and hired an evangelical consultant for her campaign. The New York senator’s efforts appeared to have paid off when, in February, a Zogby poll found that the quarter of white evangelicals who self-identify as Democrats overwhelmingly support her.

However, despite efforts to reach out to religious voters, not everyone is convinced there truly is a shift in the evangelical sector.

“Think it’s very smart politics, but I think what their advisers are doing is nailing down the mainline protestant liberal vote, which they already have,” Mr. Cromartie said. “They don’t have any sway with the broader religious conservative voters with decidedly political conservative, traditional moral stances.”

Well-known liberal evangelical Jim Wallis called evangelicals the swing voters in ’08. Not everybody agrees with his statement, but political analysts do a note a shift. Some religious voters, particularly the younger set, have changed their affiliation from Republican to independent. Nobody wants to be taken for granted in this election cycle.